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Frozen Synapse League - Season 15

I'm open to suggestions about which mode we should play. If we don't achieve some sort of consensus I'll default to Dark Extermination.

If you would like to take part please do three things:

1) Add yourself to this list. Vote for your preferred game mode while you're there. Let me know if there's any mode you'd rather not play.

2) PM your email address to me (optional, but it will be very useful if I need to give you a nudge). I will not disclose it to anyone else, except maybe WombatDeath or whoever takes over admin duties after me, but even then only with your permission. If you have previously PM'd your address to WombatDeath in an earlier season please consider sending it to me too.

3) Click here to go to the RPS forum settings and edit the 'Private Messaging' section so that you get an email and/or a popup when someone (e.g. me) sends you a PM.

Season 15 will begin on the Saturday 1st of December and will last until the 16th (and no later!), so please don't sign up if you expect to be unavailable for that period. Rules might be slightly different from previous seasons, depending on the mode we decide on, but all will be explained in this thread before the season kicks off.

New and old players are all welcome! No experience required, and weaponry will be provided. Sign up!

Frozen Synapse RPS Season 15 Preview

Hello ladies and gents! Behold the RPS Frozen Synapse Season 15 preview!
I'll try to introduce players signed up for league 15 and throw in a bit of analysis.

ColOfNature (ranked 5825) - person in charge of our league. It would be only right to begin our preview with him.

Entering the last tournament ColofNature was looking on improving his all-time disputed record which, at the time, stood at 4 games – 4 losses. The first success came in game 628738 where he managed to beat a high-ranked rodeoclown with the score of 30. Entering the 5th turn of the game with 2 men against 3 opponents, he managed a super-sleek move with his riot-shield. The move has also been referred to as a “good-bye kiss to the sniper”. Watch the game if you want to see the famed move.

Going into the new season ColOfNature will keep his fingers crossed for any mode except Disputed. An overall record of only 2 Disputed wins in 13 matches speaks for itself.

Cimethink (ranked 46) The highest ranked player of season 14.
Having won the 1st Division of season 13 Cimethink must have entered the 14th with confidence.
Much to everyone’s surprised lost early on in the league to parpel (ranked 136) in game 627975. A cautious game where parpel managed to gain control of the centerfield, which proved to be enough for a narrow 30-point victory. A game against BigBobr99 (ranked 197) 627980was marked with a clever shotgun move by his opponent which led to cimethink suffereing his last -30-point defeat of the tournament. He left his opponents no chances in his remaining games totaling a 9-2 record, 830 points and finishing second in season 14.

He will be looking to improve on his 2nd place finish in upcoming season, hoping to play his favorite Dark Charge mode (21 wins and only 5 losses in Charge games).

1. Upload (I think I have played 1 game in my life, would be nice to get to test this mode properly)
2. Light Extermination (imo undervalued as the "noobs-only-mode", in Dark Extermination the gameplay is about 50/50 between tactics and psychology in Light Extermination it' more like 80 % psychology 20 % tactics)
3. Anything else except Hostage in Dark mode

I also have a suggestion about the tournament form. Season 14 was a simple league (everyone played against everyone once where a win gave 3 points and a draw 1 point. Normal tournament system would make it easier to keep the tournamen on schedule because every stage would have a deadline of its own instead of having one big deadline at the end of the whole season. Depending on the amount of players season 15 will have the system could be best out of 1 or 3 or a combination of these two (eg the first stage would be best out of 1 but the rest of the stages would best out of 3). I would prefer using best out of 3 as much as possible without making the schedule too tight. If season 15 will be in the form of tournament (in stead of a league) I would prefer to use ELO rating as the criteria of choosing the first pairs (the highest vs the lowest, the second highest vs the second lowest, etc.) as it would be easy and fair. Another easy and fair system would be to randomize the pairs so if people (mainly ColOfNature) don't want to use the ELO rating I suggest randomization.

Too much like hard work, if you ask me :) The other problem with a tournament is we end up with half of the players only being involved in round 1 (and on recent form I'd be one of them).

Season 14 was the first time we'd done everyone-plays-everyone for a while. Until recently we were split into 2 or 3 smaller divisions and played Dark Extermination on a symmetrical map. When everyone got thoroughly bored with that we started playing different modes but, to maintain a semblance of symmetry and fairness, playing each map from both ends - i.e. when you challenged someone you played them on the same map twice, as player 1 in one match and as player 2 in the other. After we settled on Disputed for last season someone pointed out that the boxes would make it difficult to use this method fairly.

In the interest of keeping it simple (cos I'm actually quite stupid, though I hide it well) I think I'd like to revert to the tried and tested division setup, unless there's a great outcry demanding otherwise. It means everyone gets the same number of games, there aren't too many (so it won't run right through until Christmas), we can keep it relatively balanced and - most importantly! - it's a piece of cake to organise.

I'm new around here (as you can probably see) but I saw there was a FS league happening and just had to have me some of that. Not really played in a long time, so not expecting to pull in the points but it's just good to have an excuse to boot it up again. It's such a brilliant game.

The other problem with a tournament is we end up with half of the players only being involved in round 1 (and on recent form I'd be one of them).

Yeah, I too think this would be a problem to some degree since RPS FS league isn't really that competetive but a very friendly competition.

How does the division system work? I got the impression that everyone plays against everyone within the same division and that's it. If this is correct it really is everything but fair. I mean that lets assume a simple world where we have 8 players and half of them are bad and half of them are good players. There are 2 divisions A: 1, 2, 3, 4 and B: 5, 6, 7, 8. 1-4 will play against each other and so will 5-8. Let's assume that 1-4 are all good players and 5-8 bad players. Let's also assume that division A is very balanced and the win-loss records are as follows: 1: 2-1, 2:2-1, 3:1-2, 4: 1-2. Lets also assume that division B isn't that balanced and player 5 wins all games. Now player 5 wins the season even though that if s/he had played against any of players in division A s/he had lost.

To fix this I suggest that the best x players of every division continues to a separate division or into a tournament form where the winner of the season would be decided. (eg if there are only divisions A and B the winners of those divisions would play against each other or the winners and seconds would continue to semifinals).

I know I'm asking for trouble coming here and trying to change the traditions. I'm not attempting to step on anyones toes or anything so sorry if I have or will.

I think you're overcomplicating it. If the divisions are the same size from month to month the winner of division 2 gets promoted and whoever came bottom of division 1 gets relegated. If the division size has to change because we have a different number of players overall then there will be some shuffling of the divisions that way. Either way, if someone is consistently good they will rise to division 1 and if someone (like me) fails to keep up they'll find themselves slipping down to the second division as better players come along.

I really don't want to tack a second round onto the end of the tournament - at least, certainly not for December. I'd like to get season 15 done quite early as the second half of the month is going to be busy and the tourney is likely to get lost in the noise. After that, if enough people want to change the formula in the new year then I'm happy to take suggestions.

Of course there's nothing stopping the winners of the divisions from organising a match of their own to decide who's top dog. If we'd had two divisions this season and at the end Maetco - as the new guy who, it seems likely, would have risen to the top of div 2 - had cast down his gauntlet before whoever had won div 1, I doubt very much if it would have been spurned.

I think that traditional tournament formats like single-elemination, double-elemination and my favorite swiss-rounds do not work very well with FS. They all require the games to be played one after the other and the main advantage of FS is to be able to play them all at the same time. Otherwise, things will take too long.
Imagine if i play versus a guy on the opposite side of the world. It is very likely that we will only be able to do two turns per day. Assuming both of us do their two moves available every day. That means for an extermination tournament, we would at least need to offer 5 days per round as deadline. More likely are 7-8.
As it looks like we will be between 8 and 16 players, we would need 5 rounds. That would be at least 40 days.

I much prefer the old school divisions. At least it offered some kind of gratification if you managed to stay in division 1 despite never winning it.

Imagine if i play versus a guy on the opposite side of the world.
I much prefer the old school divisions. At least it offered some kind of gratification if you managed to stay in division 1 despite never winning it.

This is not something you need to imagine :)
I'm in Australia, and I know we have guys in the UK and US, so it is worldwide.

I also concur with the gratification of staying in Div 1 (although I managed to win it once... although I didn't see the notification that I'd got there until a few weeks later...)

I think that traditional tournament formats like single-elemination, double-elemination and my favorite swiss-rounds do not work very well with FS. They all require the games to be played one after the other and the main advantage of FS is to be able to play them all at the same time.

Actually I though this would be the biggest problem in tournament form not that some would get to play only 1 game.

But it seems I missunderstood how the division works. I thought that players would be randomized into divisions a get points from wins and draws and then a separate table would be constructed where there would be all the players from all the divisions and ranking would be based on points. Meaning that there would only be 1 winner, 2 second place, etc even when different people had played against different people. But apparently it works like Premier League and Championship where there are 2 separe leagues and one playing in the division 2 try to get promoted to division 1 and players in division 1 try to win it and prevent from relegated. Did I understand correctly? If so I'm wondering why it was ever changed because one of the best things about a system like that is the promotions/relegations but they only work if the system remains the same season after season.

Are the rules of the division thing written somewhere? I would like to read them. Basically I'd like to know who gets promoted/relegated, what happens if/when there are changes in the players between seasons, etc.

That's pretty much how it works, yes. It was only changed because we were getting a little bored of the same thing every month and wanted a bit of variety. Then when the vote was for a round of Disputed it was just simpler to have one big division, rather than have the smaller divisions and the two-way matches (because as the boxes will always appear in the same spots, if you played one match until they showed up you may be able to use that knowledge to your advantage in the other game - especially if the map is conducive to one player camping the boxes locations).

Anyway, the divisions were never terribly formal. Because the players taking part each month has been quite fluid, sometimes the first division might have only 4 people, sometimes 5 or 6, just depending on how many people were around. And there wasn't really a hard and fast rule about what division you'd end up in if you took a month off and came back - I just looked at where you'd been last and tried to make as balanced a choice as I could.

In fact, a lack of hard-and-fast rules is generally how this operates. It's all a bit informal. I inherited it from WombatDeath (who originally organised the league) and proceeded to run it pretty much by the seat of my pants. You can see the rules in the threads from prior months - find them by clicking the "frozen synapse league" tag down below - but the genral form hasn't changed much over the last year-and-a-bit.

Like I say, after next month I'm happy to make some more changes to the format if that's what the consensus calls for. Formalising rules and so on isn't really my bag, but if people have had enough of my wing-it-and-hope approach then we can sort something out.

Hi.
I bought this game some time back on a humble bundle offer. I've only played a handful of rounds here and there over the months. I haven't a strategic bone in my body and tend to suck majorly at these type of games (tbs, rts etc) and FS is no exception to that rule (the first night I played online, I lost every ... single ... round) but there's something about it that I like (possibly because it's like a top down sq based fps) and so I've kept it installed. I may be interested in adding another body to this event but I have a couple of questions.
Do I need the red dlc? Do you employ timed turns? Are you all shit hot uber strategists? Does everyone use that annoying duck/stand/duck/stand to screw with my sniper?
Cheers.

- If the divisions are the same size from month to month the winner of division 2 gets promoted and whoever came bottom of division 1 gets relegated.
- To maintain a semblance of symmetry and fairness, playing each map from both ends - i.e. when you challenged someone you played them on the same map twice, as player 1 in one match and as player 2 in the other.

And everything else is winged.

When you say that everyone plays every map as player 1 and as player 2 does that mean that everyone playes against each other twice?

I don't really see why you had to "reject" the division form just because we couldn't use the two-way matches (as you called it)? I don't really see any connection between them. To me one is the league form and the other is a method to increase fairness. To be completely honest I don't really feel that the two-way matches increases that much fairness because the only real way to have an unbalanced/unfair match is to put two unidentical teams against each other. Someone claimed during season 14 that it's not that big of a deal in duspute but really if one team has 4 machine gunners and the other has 1 machine gunner, 1 rocket launcher, 1 shotgun and 1 sniper and I would get to pick which one to take there's no question which one I'd pick.

Only if we (actually ColOfNature has the final say in this, it's not a democratic vote or anything but I've heard that the opinion of the people does matter) decide to play upload and even then only the challenger needs to have it and I'm pretty sure that most of the player have it and that they are ready to make a little sacrifice and do the challenging for the people who don't have it. But ColOfNature is the only one who can actually give you an official answer to this one.

Originally Posted by scozzers

Are you all shit hot uber strategists?

Hell yeah! No not really. Season 14 was my first RPS FS season/tournament and I had played less than 10 matches before that. I don't really know how telling you about my FS experience aswers your question about "us" (as if I would somehow represent the rest of the RPS FS players) and "our" strategic capabilities but thought it wouldn't hurt either.

Originally Posted by scozzers

Does everyone use that annoying duck/stand/duck/stand to screw with my sniper?

When you say that everyone plays every map as player 1 and as player 2 does that mean that everyone playes against each other twice?

Yarp.

I don't really see why you had to "reject" the division form just because we couldn't use the two-way matches (as you called it)? I don't really see any connection between them.

It was mainly due to the fact that if you played against someone in Disputed and got to round 5 when the boxes appeared you might then find that knowledge favoured one player in the second match - it may not be likely, but not impossible either. So I decided to relax the symmetry rules for season 14, although there were one or two cases where the challenged player requested a new challenge because they felt that the mismatch was too great. I figured that was fine as long as both parties were okay with it.

edit: And Hi, scozzers! Welcome aboard. Maetco pretty much covered it. Also, it's about having fun more than anything else. I make it all up as I go along, and I rule with a velvet fist in an iron glove.

I'm new around here (as you can probably see) but I saw there was a FS league happening and just had to have me some of that. Not really played in a long time, so not expecting to pull in the points but it's just good to have an excuse to boot it up again. It's such a brilliant game.

I look forward to seeing you all on the battlefield!

Welcome.

And rodeo, you must have the best job ever because it seems you're always summoned to play when I take my turns at night.

Thanks for the quick responses, (semi) clarifications and hearty! welcomes.
Gonna grab the red dlc anyway (as it's cheap on steam right now) and see what the riot shield is about. If I don't make this season, I'll at least try play some of you at some point to reinvigorate my interest in this good game and then maybe go in for next season.
Cheers again.

It was mainly due to the fact that if you played against someone in Disputed and got to round 5 when the boxes appeared you might then find that knowledge favoured one player in the second match...

Sorry for not being more clear about my question. I see that it's not always fair in Disputed to know where the boxes will turn up but my question wasn't about why didn't we use the two-way method (because it could create unbalanced situation in the second match) but why didn't we use the divisions without the two-way? In the end the divisions are just like what we had in season 14 (if I have understood everything correctly) with the exception that there are two smaller divisions (I'd like to call them leagues instead because usually divisions mean a different thing eg. in NHL) instead of just one.

Oh, and as I already kind of hinted, regardless what mode we'll be playing in the end I would really like it if the teams would be required to be indentical in all of the matches. Not in the sense that player 1 team should be identical in match 1 and match 2 but that the player 1 team should be identical to player 2 team in match 1, the player 1 team should be identical to player 2 team in match 2, etc... I hope you can understand my rambling.